A Cause Worth Dying For
by Distorted Pheonix
Summary: My name was Ronald Weasley. I was a spy.


My name was Ronald Weasley. I was rarely acknowledged as such, though, except for friends and family. To strangers I was, "Harry Potter's best friend" or "A Weasley kid". Never Ron Weasley. 

Not very surprising, considering I was nothing special. It was so frustrating, to be the tallest in a room, and yet still overlooked. Always in the shadows. Family, friends, it didn't matter, I was the one who blended into the background.

They all outshone me. Bill, with his good looks and charm, Charlie with his dragons, Fred and George with their pranks. Perfect Percy had perfect grades, and Ginny was the youngest, and the only girl. In the middle was me, fantastic chess player and not much else. 

And of course, there was the matter of school. The Boy Who Lived and Head Girl Hermione. And me. Always added as an afterthought. I just wasn't memorable, nothing exceptional about me to make me stick out.

But now, everyone will know my name. It will be whispered in every wizard household before the day is through, spoken with reverence and awe. 

My name was Ronald Weasley. I was a spy. 

I discovered my talent during my seventh year. Why was I nothing special? Why did I have no talents? Truth is, I did, but never noticed. Why? Because that talent was to go unnoticed, to fade into the background despite a 6' 7'' frame and flaming hair. 

So I joined the ranks of Voldemort.

Not for real. I was like Snape, who gathered information from the Death Eaters at great cost to his well being. But Snape wasn't there any more to do it.

He died only months after I left Hogwarts, months after Fudge was killed and Percy became Minister of Magic. It was with his death that the rising of Voldemort was finally acknowledged, the first act my brother made while in office. 

I replaced him, allowing the Dark Mark to be burned into my skin. Voldemort never really glanced at me. To him I was just another eager teenager, hungry for power. But to a select few, I was their only source of information on him.

The general wizarding world was told I had switched openly to the Dark Side and that Aurors were now on my trail. But they weren't. They knew, along with Percy, Harry, Hermione, and the Order of the Pheonix, formed in our fifth year, of my double agent act. 

Voldemort was obsessed, obsessed with killing Harry. I told him so, and he told the Order. They advised him to use the Fidelus Charm. They told him not to use me as his Secret Keeper.

My temper always flared whenever that got brought up. I knew why they didn't want me as Secret Keeper. Not because I was working close to Voldemort, but because they remembered, eighteen years before, the betrayal of Peter Pettigrew. He too had been overlooked, and they knew I felt the same.

But they were wrong. I would never betray my friend. Never. 

Harry trusted me, and insisted on making me the Secret Keeper, despite the Order's protests. And so it was done.

He was right to trust me.

Voldemort discovered me a year later, high in ranking of the Death Eaters. He had never noticed me before, never noticed that I was Harry Potter's friend. The moment he truly looked at me was the moment I knew I was lost. Those crimson eyes searched my mahogany ones, and in an agonizing instant, I knew he knew.

He tortured me, both physically and magically. Tried, over and over, to make me spill my Secret. For three days and three nights, I was flayed, hit with Crucio, punched, hit, pommeled with an iron bar. When Harry finally found me, a week later, at the deserted Death Eater headquarters, I was so covered in blood that I was unrecognizable to him. Broken bones in both legs and arms, cracked ribs, heavy lacerations on every part of skin that was revealed, hands and feet horribly mutilated. Skull crushed.

I died before I could betray him. I would do it again, to save him.

My true motives were announced to the public. My mother cried with both grief and joy as she read the article in Daily Prophet. Joy, because I hadn't betrayed Harry and the family. Grief, because I was dead.

But I was not disappointed because I was dead. For the first time, I was not in the shadows, I was in the light, I was the light. I finally knew what I had been placed on this earth to do. I was not there to help Harry Potter, nor to betray him, but to save him, the last hope of a desperate society, their sole icon of hope.

My name was Ronald Weasley. I died before I could betray a friend.

The Savior. The Hero. The Martyr.


End file.
